This board is a composition workshop, like a writers' workshop: post your work with questions about style or vocabulary, comment on other people's work, post composition challenges on some topic or form, or just dazzle us with your inventive use of galliambics.

auctor wrote:Each stanza comprises a pherecretean, followed by a glyconic, followed by a glyconic increased by an iamb (which may or may not be a classically attested colon, but it is post-classical now )

Certainly not in Greek! The usual three-line patterns are aab, aaA or AAa.

Yes Will,
I realise that my Latin scribbling did not comply with any precise classical format. I was 'boundary-pushing' in the manner of tricolon auctum in an effort to replicate Tennyson's build up of excitement - the bird(s) sit alone doing nix before swooping down for their devastating finale... 3 increasingly longer lines describing their situation, 2 and a half increasingly longer lines describing their watching/hunting and a final 4 sharp syllables to portray the instananeous denouement. A long, gradual build up, and a snap of the fingers and it's all over - isn't that how eagles hunt?

Anyway, that's my justification Will, I'd be delighted to hear your further thoughts. I have no doubt the same sentiments in Greek will make exhilarating reading - tomorrow's project perhaps.

Of course it has to be understood that classical usage may not need to have its envelopes pushed - even if it did, I would be the least qualified person to do so.

I'm not sure Greek poets thought of meters that way. Not, of course, that this should prevent you.

Of course it has to be understood that classical usage may not need to have its envelopes pushed - even if it did, I would be the least qualified person to do so.

Well, people writing verses in Latin in Greek do tend to follow meters that have some precedent somewhere. Of course, that hasn't stopped me from concocting strophic forms myself. But I also have a notebook full of strophic forms listed in West's Greek Meter. Two ionic 3-cola strophes: